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Health care lobbyists representing insurers, drugmakers and a range of powerful industry interests are steeling themselves for a Senate chair immune to their usual charms — Bernie Sanders.

The Vermont independent is set to take over the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee next month. Leading the panel gives the Medicare-for-All proponent oversight authority over some of his policy priorities — drug pricing, workers’ rights and income inequality, and student and medical debt.

But Sanders’ well-chronicled antagonism toward lobbyists has some concerned they’ll be unable to blunt criticism of their clients’ profits or corporate executive salaries. They are anxious Sanders might seek to revive policies like importing drugs from Canada and other nations, an idea loathed by drugmakers.

Lobbyists also worry they’ll struggle to get traction on any push to make changes to a drug discount program involving pharmaceutical companies and hospitals or revisit association health plans after a Trump-era rule around them was voided.

“This will not be business as usual for K Street. It will be harder for companies to get in and make a case,” said Michaeleen Crowell, a lobbyist at lobbying and public affairs firm S-3 Group who served as Sanders’ chief of staff for more than five years. “The culture in the office is one where lobbyists are mistrusted, and they’re more likely to discount what they hear directly from companies.”

POLITICO spoke to more than a dozen lobbyists and lawyers about having Sanders at the helm of the HELP Committee, some of whom were granted anonymity to talk about the senator’s dynamic with K Street.

Multiple lobbyists representing health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, providers and health systems told POLITICO they’re going to have to “bank shot” their advocacy to get their messages across — lobbying other lawmakers on the committee and getting into the ears of progressive policymakers and left-leaning organizations.

“There are ways to get things passively on his radar if you know him well enough, if you know who he listens to or what he reads,” Crowell said.

Sanders’ office declined to respond to questions from POLITICO, including those about his relationship with lobbyists.

Lobbyists said another strategy could be working to insert favorable provisions into larger bills, lean on the panel’s House counterpart, the Energy and Commerce Committee, or go to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who is stepping down as HELP Committee chair to head the Senate Appropriations Committee.

“It’s not status quo … we’re going to have to be creative with patient groups to get him to listen,” said a lobbyist with health system, health insurance and pharmaceutical clients granted anonymity to speak freely. “If I’m going to be completely honest, we’re still trying to figure out what we’re going to do.”

Sanders has talked about working to boost access to care, lower drug costs, expand the health care workforce and raise wages, and possibly reach across the aisle. Sanders is also expected to push the jurisdictional bounds of the committee, potentially taking on issues such as the health impacts of climate change.

K Street will likely watch how often Sanders collaborates with the committee’s incoming ranking member, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), as the two have a history of working across the aisle. Although some lobbyists have floated policies around drug pricing and surprise billing as a possibility for them to find agreement, it’s not entirely clear if they’ll end up on the same page.

“There’s a good chance the committee becomes a one-legged duck, swimming in circles,” said a Republican lobbyist and former HELP Committee staffer granted anonymity to speak freely.

But if the two end up aligning on some issues, that could be a liability for some industry clients on K Street.

Jeff Forbes, co-founder of lobbying and public affairs firm Forbes Tate, said Sanders has a history of bipartisanship, particularly while chairing the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and will work to get stuff done — “the question is going to be what, and at whose expense?”

“Does corporate America have to worry? Of course they do,” he added. “Between a populist Republican like Cassidy and a left-wing chairman like Sanders, they’ll have plenty of anti-corporate areas of mutual interest.”

With the Senate majority comes subpoena power, and it’s almost certain that health executives will be called to testify before the committee — a reputational risk for corporations.

“Subpoena authority is certainly something that gets people paying attention,” said Rafi Prober, co-head of the congressional investigations practice at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

And conditions are ripe for the HELP Committee to beef up its hearings schedule: The panel has only a few must-do items next session — reauthorizing both pandemic preparedness legislation known as PAHPA and an animal drug user fee bill — and Democratic priorities aren’t expected to move, given the GOP-controlled House. This gives Sanders the runway to dig into any issue he wants.

Most senior members of Congress have relationships with K Street because lobbyists had worked for — or closely with — them while serving as Capitol Hill aides, have donated to their campaigns or otherwise have become close with their staff.

Sanders, meanwhile, isn’t rubbing elbows with executives and lobbyists at fundraisers and doesn’t have a “kitchen cabinet” of donor-advisers he talks with about policy, Crowell and others said. He’s sworn off all money from political action committees — even ones run by other senators and members of Congress — to his Senate campaigns.

Further, most of his staffers have a mix of experience working for him, progressive campaigns and nonprofits and share the aversion to downtown corporate lobbyists.

“The prospects of a Sanders-led HELP committee are refreshing and exciting,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist at Public Citizen who works on money-in-politics and ethics issues.

“The chairman will give everyone their due, including lobbyists representing the public’s interest, without being swayed by campaign cash,” he said. “Sanders’ new leadership position will help build some equity between the influence of the haves and have-nots, of which Public Citizen and other nonprofits more or less qualify as the latter.”

But one Democratic lobbyist who advocates before the HELP Committee, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the dynamic, said Sanders’ staff members rarely take people’s meetings.

“It’s hard to find a lobbyist [who] has had much success working with his staff. If the committee wants to be taken seriously on some very important issues, they’re going to need to be more open to talking with stakeholders — even ones [they] don’t like,” he said.

Not all lobbyists are so down on their prospects. Michael Strazzella, the leader of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney’s federal government relations practice, said he is optimistic about working with Sanders and his staff.

“He can be educated just like every other senator,” Strazzella said. “Influence is a strong word, to be honest, but I do believe that he is open to continuous education and understands the impact of new policies. … I don’t think he’s necessarily set in his ways about everything.”

Aside from his current staff, much of the dynamic with K Street will depend on who he brings in to work on the committee, several lobbyists told POLITICO.

Some hope it will be a departure from his traditional hiring patterns, but one lobbyist who has relationships with Sanders’ health care staff said he wants them to stick around.

“I just hope they stay because we at least know who we will be working with next year and can have conversations with them,” said the lobbyist, who was granted anonymity to speak about the relationship, in an email. “I worry about the staff changing some and not knowing any of the… players coming in and their approach to interacting with downtown.”

Ben Leonard contributed to this report. 

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Even before Elon Musk’s dramatic and controversial takeover of Twitter, the restless mogul was pitching the social-media company as his key to realizing a much bigger dream.

Musk calls his next idea the “X App.” And if Musk-owned Twitter has already been a challenge for Washington’s politicians and regulators, the disruption caused by the X App could easily dwarf it.

The idea is a Western version of WeChat, the Chinese super-app that more than a billion people use for messaging, payments, shopping, rideshares, gaming, news and other daily activities. Musk is clearly serious about the plan: He tweeted about it this fall and pitched it to Twitter employees before he even bought the company, and reiterated the idea during a Twitter Spaces session in early December, saying “WeChat has a lot of functionality that Twitter should have.”

But building a “super-app” like WeChat is a far more complicated challenge than Twitter, with far more points of conflict with regulators in Washington, California, Brussels and elsewhere. Nothing like it exists yet in the West, and it could create a “regulatory nightmare,” said Caitriona Fitzgerald, the deputy director for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit that advocates for privacy reform.

For all its influence on media and politics, Twitter is a far smaller social platform than Facebook or TikTok, with relatively little exposure to government oversight. Anything that involves payments, health information or deeper uses of consumer data would be a whole different beast. And that’s all without integrating some of Musk’s wider and more futuristic interests, like his brain-computer interface company, his space-launch business, or his network of satellites, all of which draw their own kind of scrutiny.

If Musk tried to launch it, he’d be doing it in a moment when regulators and politicians are increasingly worried about Big Tech’s appetite for data, its impact on consumers’ lives and its unique ability to build monopolies — to say nothing of the political storm Musk has brought down on his own head with his increasingly partisan forays into politics. (Twitter did not reply to a request for comment about Musk’s app plans or regulatory strategy.)

There are plenty of business-world obstacles to the X App, and Musk has had his hands more than full just keeping Twitter afloat. But he’s also seen as ambitious enough to try anyway.

“Twitter is just one end of this future conglomerate app,” said Michael Sayman, a developer who helped create Instagram Stories, speculating that the X App could include finance, commerce, communication, news, entertainment, dating, music — and, of course, transportation, Musk’s chief business interest.

What could a Musk-owned super-app look like, and how would it collide with Washington? There’s no one authoritative answer — and a Twitter collapse would bring a quick end to the vision for now — but from observers and analysts, it’s possible to engineer a kind of preview of the maximal version of what he wants to do, and project just how many corners of Washington could find themselves facing off against one of the wealthiest men on earth.

Financial Services

The first and biggest question hanging over an “everything app” is money — specifically, payments and even banking.

Musk pitched investors on building Twitter into a digital payments behemoth that could generate as much as $1.8 billion by 2028 when he was getting financing for the buyout earlier this year. He hasn’t dropped that ambition: “It’s kind of a no-brainer for Twitter to have payments — in terms of both currency and crypto — and make that simple for people to use,” Musk said in the December Twitter Spaces.

Musk is publicly floating the concept of Twitter offering high-yield money market accounts, debit cards and checks. He has reportedlyalready filed paperwork to process payments. This clearly takes a page from WeChat’s playbook: The Chinese app created new ways for consumers and businesses to transact without cards or hardware, making money through merchant and withdrawal fees.

He’s not the first tech mogul to dream of an American version. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to launch his own digital currency, the Libra, and failed — but still considers it a missed opportunity. Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey also co-founded the payments company Block (formerly known as Square) and pursued a payments strategy that let Twitter users incorporate their handles for CashApp. The company also partnered with Stripe to let users pay businesses and creative outlets they discover on the social network. Those efforts haven’t transformed Twitter into a payments powerhouse, however.

Musk wouldn’t be coming to this cold: The Tesla CEO has an extensive background at payment-focused fintech startups — he co-founded the online bank X.com, which later merged with a Peter Thiel-led business to form PayPal. And his backers in the buyout include Binance, the global crypto exchange, as well as Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture firm that’s invested heavily in digital asset startups.

“I think it would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter so that it’s easy to send money back and forth,” Musk said at a Twitter all-hands meeting earlier this year. “Currency as well as crypto.”

But if he tries, he’ll be entering one of the most tightly regulated spaces in American business. Unlike social-media platforms, which only hit Washington’s radar recently, banking and payment companies have been under the microscope for decades, with multiple agencies and vast regulatory requirements to meet — a task that Musk has struggled with, even disdained, as an entrepreneur.

If the X App developed digital wallets for users or a crypto-friendly token for payments, Musk could face opposition from banking regulators like the Federal Reserve and Treasury as well as top lawmakers on the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would likely weigh in on how the social network handled instances of fraud and abuse. And Musk could invite even more scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission if he were to bring crypto trading to the platform.

Zuckerberg’s experience in trying to launch Libra — later rebranded as Diem — in 2019 is a sobering precedent: Despite an aggressive international lobbying campaign, policymakers from both parties — and on the other side of the Atlantic — blasted his far-reaching proposal for being a potential threat to global finance and commerce.

Consumer groups that opposed Meta’s efforts are already bracing for a similar fight if Musk tries to get into the game — possibly even more intense, given Musk’s newly contentious political brand, highly impulsive management style and propensity to tweak Congress and regulators.

“A big part of what really led to the downfall of Diem was the bad press around Mark Zuckerberg and Meta specifically,” said Cheyenne Hunt-Majer, a big tech policy advocate at Public Citizen. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Elon Musk is looking at this and saying, ‘Okay, well, I can do this differently.’”

Privacy

Any successful X App would bring in a massive new haul of consumer data – and would require the company to navigate a complicated, evolving new patchwork of U.S. and EU data-privacy rules.

Musk has already suggested Twitter’s immediate future would includeadvertisements carefully tailored to individual users — which could mean more sophisticated use of customer data. This data collection would likely only increase with an X App that touched more parts of people’s lives.

Even before Musk took over, however, Twitter struggled to meet basic privacy and data-handling requirements.

The company has been under a consent decree with FTC since 2011 for previously mishandling user data and paid a$150 million fine in May 2022 for breaking its commitment to protect user data again. The FTC is currently investigating allegations made by former Twitter security chief Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, who claims the company intentionally misled the agency and violated the terms of the 2011 settlement, according to a person familiar with the probe who is not authorized to speak publicly.

At Twitter, Musk’s abrupt staff cuts, and the exodus of its top privacy, cybersecurity and compliance executives, have already drawn a rare warning shot from the Federal Trade Commission: The FTC said in a statement in mid-November, “We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern,” adding, “no CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees.”

And Democrats on Capitol Hill are paying attention too — calling on the FTC to enforce its consent decree — which could mean large fines and penalties for Musk’s Twitter if it is found to have violated the settlement terms.

His ambition also arrives amid growing concerns about U.S. consumer data security and privacy protections. Though Congress hasn’t managed to pass a comprehensive data privacy bill, several states are already plowing ahead with their own rules, including California, Virginia and Colorado, creating a complicated patchwork for tech companies to navigate. And any company with a global presence also needs to worry about Europe’s data privacy law — the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which gives consumers the right to opt out of data collection. Some aspects of the X App would also be subject to sectoral federal privacy laws, like in finance and health care.

Musk would also immediately draw a spotlight from privacy advocates, who worry that he’d potentially have access to millions of Americans’ data without any federal law to ensure it’s properly protected.

“As a society, we really have kind of started getting to a point where we feel uncomfortable with the loss of privacy,” said Karan Lala, a software engineer who previously worked at Facebook. “Maybe folks are not fully comfortable with having one person having access to all of that information.”

Health care

In China, people can look up doctors, book them, conduct a telehealth appointment and even manage their medical records inside of WeChat. In other countries, patients can use WhatsApp to book their doctor appointments over text.

In the U.S., that kind of user-friendly approach to health care is largely blocked by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the 1996 patient-protection law setting strict rules around how health care providers share and store data.

So an X App could track your fitness, scrape your data and log your steps, but hit a wall when it comes to the highly regulated world of the American medical system. It doesn’t mean Musk wouldn’t try — but he’d need to find partners willing to test the edges of what’s possible under the law.

Musk does have his own medical venture, though, and that raises another question. Neuralink is a brain-computer interface that allows a person to navigate a computer directly from their brain with an implantable device. Musk says the company has submitted “most” of the paperwork needed to get the FDA go ahead for a clinical trial in 2023 in order to bring that invention to market.

Right now, brain-computer interfaces are being trialed to help people with paralysis, but Neuralink’s website tantalizingly promises a “non-medical application” and says the technology could someday “expand how we interact with each other and experience the world around us.”

If a person used a Neuralink chip to interact with the X App, would the app literally be reading that person’s mind? And what happens to the data? Brain data isn’t necessarily protected by HIPAA, and the issue is not yet on Washington’s radar, but it’s a real concern among policy thinkers; Chile recently became the first country to protect “neurorights.”

At this point, the idea of a neural connection to any app is purely speculative. However, it’s not as sci-fi as it might sound: Synchron, a competing BCI company, which launched an FDA clinical trial earlier this year, already allowed one patient to Tweet directly from their brain.

Transportation

Though Musk is often lumped in with pure tech moguls like Zuckerberg, he’s primarily a transportation mogul — a maker of cars and rockets, with some interest in tunnels.

Musk hasn’t talked specifically about the transportation side of an X App. But WeChat also offers a ride-hailing service, and the X app has a range of potential applications for ride-hailing, transit and more.

Ian McAdams, a specialist in the automotive technology practice at the Orrick law firm, envisions an app that offers a “hub of information” for easy access to “hopping on transit, hopping in a rideshare, hailing an automated system — who knows what that will look like, at what point.”

Putting Musk at the center of an identity-verification app with security implications could be problematic, though. McAdams said government regulators might be skeptical of the arrangement — to say nothing of any connection to Tesla, whose cars are already software-intensive products that constantly track user behavior. “The big question mark right now is, we’ve got an FTC and a DOJ that takes a really dim view of all kinds of data-sharing arrangements and particularly of consolidation,” McAdams said. The FTC is “going to take a fine-tooth comb through everything that they attempt to do.”

Antitrust

Both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are looking more and more closely at big tech companies’ anti-competitive behavior. And While Musk’s businesses don’t currently run afoul of monopoly review by either agency, that could easily change if he were to buy a lot of other apps, said Charlotte Slaiman, the competition policy director at nonprofit Public Knowledge.

She said antitrust regulators may be concerned about a vertical relationship wherein Musk incentivizes his X App offering over competitors. And antitrust regulators may weigh in if Musk purchases another app that competes directly on his platform.

“From a competitive climate, now might not be the best time to even put up the fact that you want an app that does everything,” former Facebook engineer Lala said. “I don’t think Congress is going to take lightly to that, so that might be victim number one.”

There’s a counterargument, though, based on the fact that the X App would be the first of its kind. Graham DuFault, a senior director of public policy at ACT | The App Association, a trade group representing app developers, says that U.S. policies tend to be conducive to new market entrants — at least to start.

“One of the striking things about the U.S. competition, law and policy landscape is that it’s pretty permissive in that it treats a new company’s entry as something that is a benefit to competition and a benefit to consumers unless there really is evidence that is going to harm competition, and then therefore harm consumers,” DuFault said in an interview. 

The network in the sky

When it comes to other competitors, Musk has an offering that many others still don’t have — Starlink, the world’s satellite internet constellation company. Operated by his firm SpaceX, it provides service to at least 36 countries, with plans to offer mobile phone service with T-Mobile in 2023.

Depending on how he links up the satellites and the X App, Musk could start to collide with California’s net neutrality law — which says internet service providers are not allowed to slow down or limit services online, especially efforts to advantage their products over competitors. Ever since the Trump administration rescinded the FCC’s net neutrality policy — and Congress has failed to enact it into law — California’s law is the de facto law of the land.

Using Starlink internet, Musk would be able to streamline faster and more efficient access to the X App services — and potentially throttle access to competing mega-apps, Sayman said. This preference of service could potentially run afoul of California’s rules.

It could be worth him testing the waters on that, even if it’s risky: “The level of fundamental dominance that could be achieved — if he’s able to do that well — I think positions his ‘X’ company to be able to do all the rest of this stuff,” Sayman said.

Politics

For the average big tech giant, politics is a third-tier risk at best: The companies and moguls strategically spread out their political donations, and only occasionally do executives run afoul of elected officials, or get hauled in front of Congress.

Musk is different. After being out of the political wind for years, he has jumped full-bore into the American culture wars, attacking Democrats by name, re-platforming Donald Trump and hosting elaborate Twitter threads suggesting collusion between the FBI and his own company. He’s also aligned himself with Republicans, encouraging votes for the GOP in the 2022 midterms and backing a Ron DeSantis run for president in 2024, earning him the kind of support from the GOP that other tech billionaires can only dream of.

However, Congress has failed to pass bipartisan tech legislation — and is unlikely to next year under a split House and Senate — so the action is expected to continue in state capitals where legislatures have passed the most aggressive laws regulating tech platforms to date.

So far, there has been more smoke than fire on the political front. But a bigger consumer platform could easily change that, as activists, think tanks, elected officials and voters increasingly see Musk as a player in American political life – either for better or worse.

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The House adjourned without a speaker on Tuesday for the first time in a century after Kevin McCarthy failed in a third straight vote for the gavel.

And in the final ballot, the GOP leader watched his support begin to chip away.

Staring down a threadbare majority, McCarthy has been unable to dislodge dug-in opposition from the right flank of his conference, who are now openly pushing for conservative hero Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to take the gavel.

GOP lawmakers now hope to resolve their leadership battle privately after several humiliating hours on the floor. McCarthy and his allies have already begun talks with some of the 20 defectors in a desperate attempt to break the detente before the House will resume at noon Wednesday.

“We’re going to go have some more conversations tonight, to see what’s next,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), one of McCarthy’s chief antagonists. He declined to say whether McCarthy’s 20 dissenters would be meeting on their own, but said the talks would include members “across the conference.”

But by the time lawmakers return at noon on Wednesday, it’s not clear if McCarthy would still be the one seeking votes — or another member entirely.

After 14 years in leadership, McCarthy has now tried and failed three times to fulfill his decade-long dream of becoming speaker. In another troubling sign for the GOP leader, he lost the vote of someone who had been supporting him: Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) flipped on the third ballot to support Jordan.

For most of Tuesday, McCarthy’s allies insisted they would keep voting until a path emerged for him to seize the gavel, an attempt to grind down his opponents. What resulted was a game of high-stakes chicken — just the second time since the Civil War that a party required multiple attempts to elect a speaker on the House floor.

But that sentiment began to shift by the third vote, with many GOP lawmakers seeing no path for McCarthy to win without a major shift in dynamics. And some feared that the California Republican could lose even more support beyond Donald’s without some personal intervention.

“I think it’s going to be increasingly clear that he’s not going to be speaker. We will never cave,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said after conservatives blocked McCarthy from winning the gavel, urging him to drop out.

In a bid to cut off McCarthy opponents at their knees, Jordan gave an impassioned speech nominating the Californian, but that did little to move the detractors. Unlike in the first round of voting — where McCarthy picked up undecided House Freedom Caucus members, including Reps. Ben Cline (Va.) and Clay Higgins (La.), and Rep.-elect Mike Collins (R-Ga.), who had previously pledged to vote against McCarthy — the GOP leader didn’t pick up any new support in the second round.

How long the speaker’s fight will last remains the House’s favorite parlor game. McCarthy acknowledged on Tuesday that it “could” last for days, while one of his opponents, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), said they could persist for “six more months.” In the meantime, the House GOP risks a chaotic floor fight, with no rules of the chamber yet in place. The chamber cannot even swear in its members without a speaker.

Those 20 opposition votes came despite fierce pressure from McCarthy and his wide band of allies that he has honed over the years — with some members even vowing to punish defectors from removing them from committees.

“No one in this body has worked harder for this Republican majority than Kevin McCarthy,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who leads the GOP conference, said in a booming floor speech delivered moments before lawmakers began to vote.

After brewing for years, the revolt against McCarthy materialized on the floor in front of all 434 members (with the seat of the late Democratic Rep. Don McEachin still vacant). On a day of plenty of pomp and circumstance, dozens of lawmakers brought squirming children, including at least one crying infant, as they sat through the full roll call vote.

The substantial bloc of opposition against McCarthy marks an increase from the day prior, when only five House Republicans had publicly declared they would vote against their party leader.

But storm clouds were brewing over McCarthy throughout Tuesday. Just before heading to the floor, House Republicans gathered for a tense — and at times, raucous — meeting where McCarthy and his top supporters erupted at the dozen-plus conservative hardliners vowing to block his speaker’s bid.

In a fiery speech to his conference in the closed-door meeting, McCarthy underscored the extensive concessions he has made to those who have vowed to oppose him, largely those in the House Freedom Caucus, according to multiple members in the room. He also told members that there are about 20 GOP lawmakers who plan to vote against him, far more than the five who have publicly opposed him — in a preview of the chaos that he met on the floor.

“I earned this job. We earned this majority, and Goddammit we are going to win it today,” McCarthy said to a standing ovation, according to lawmakers in the room.

It wasn’t just the California Republican calling out the conservative hardliners at the conference meeting. Many of McCarthy’s frustrated supporters, too, unloaded on the band of detractors. At one point, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, pushed the idea that any Republican who opposes McCarthy should be stripped of committee assignments.

Roy, one of McCarthy’s chief antagonists, spoke up to defend his position — and lashed out against Rogers’ remarks about keeping fellow Republicans off committees, shouting profanities at his colleague. Rogers said after the meeting that his warning that the Steering Committee will block McCarthy opponents from getting committee assignments wasn’t just a threat: “I promised it.”

And McCarthy shot back at Roy’s defense of his opposition: “You’re not voting against me, it’s against the conference and the country.”

Roy wasn’t the only Republican vowing to vote against McCarthy to speak up. Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Norman both reiterated their stances to the conference. The GOP leader responded to Perry: “What’s left? What do you want?”

Other anti-McCarthy members, including Perry and Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), publicly railed against McCarthy after the closed-door meeting, arguing that his allies were resorting to political threats instead of making a deal. Boebert had just announced her public opposition Tuesday morning, along with Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.).

Even before the explosive meeting, early signs Tuesday didn’t point in McCarthy’s favor. Perry offered blistering criticism of McCarthy just before the meeting, saying conservatives had asked for several concessions like commitments on committee seats that, in turn, would get him to 218 votes, but that the California Republican declined.

McCarthy has worked fervently to lock down support, releasing a long list of concessions he’s prepared to make on rules changes, including making it easier to depose a speaker.

In a significant win for conservatives, McCarthy set the number of Republican backers needed to force a vote on deposing the speaker at five, to the dismay of some rank-and-file members. It’s an about-face from just weeks ago, when the conference set the threshold to prompt such a vote, known as the motion to vacate, at a majority of its members. And some conservatives argue that’s not good enough — they want one member to be able to force such a motion.

Some Republicans say McCarthy should make a deal to persuade some Democrats to leave the floor after several ballots. Others, like Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), have floated that if conservatives block McCarthy, they could work with a band of centrist Democrats to elect a more moderate Republican instead.

For now, Democrats have no plans to intervene to help McCarthy or another Republican as their party flails. But there have been quiet conversations about what they could extract from the GOP if the speaker’s race did come to a breaking point. Some are even discussing plans for a possible power-sharing agreement — a scenario that several Republicans described as outlandish.

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